The EAF is dead! Long live the MENL!

The Front National has long been at the
centre of pan-European party initiatives, which were always dominated by former
FN leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The EAF was founded without FN-involvement,
however.

Aymeric Chauprade. Realpolitik.tv/Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved.What a difference a year makes. It seems
like only yesterday that National Front (FN) leader Marine Le Pen visited her
new friend, Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders, in The Hague, and
announced that together they were going to “wreck” the European Union (EU) from within.

Their preferred sledgehammer was the
European Alliance for Freedom (EAF), the latest incarnation of a pan-European
far right party. For months journalists and pundits speculated wildly about the
imminent and seemingly inevitable success of the EAF in the upcoming European
elections of May 2014; the question was not if
the EAF would be able to form an official political group in the next European
Parliament, but how big it was going
to be. Much of this speculation was directly fed by Le Pen and Wilders, who
(over)confidently claimed that they had the required support, which was
uncritically echoed in the media. Even some academic experts bought into the hype, arguing that “the times they are a-changin’ - albeit
slowly” – i.e. the EAF was
going to be successful where previous attempts had failed.

Despite the far right “earthquake” that, at least according to the international
media, shook Europe in May, the EAF failed to materialize inside the EP. Le Pen
and Wilders were not able to attract any new members, getting stuck with just
five members: FN, PVV, Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), the Belgian Flemish Interest (VB),
and the Italian Northern League (LN). The only other party that had committed
to the EAF, the Slovak National Party (SNS), lost its representation in the EP.

In the post-elections courting game, Le
Pen and Wilders were unable to convince Nigel Farage, leader of both the United
Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the Europe for Freedom and Democracy political
group (now Europe for Freedom and Direct Democracy, EFDD). Even worse, while
Farage lost various members to the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR),
including the far right Danish People’s Party (DF), he was able to maintain the
Lithuanian Order and Justice (TT) and add the Czech Party of Free Citizens (Svobodni) and the Sweden Democrats (SD),
which were all widely tipped to be joining the EAF.

Earlier this month the EAF died a silent
death. While it still exists de jure,
it has ceased to exist de facto. This
time mostly ignored by the international media, the FN recently announced the founding of a new Euro-party, the Movement for
a Europe of Nations and Freedom (MENL). While early reports from Polish media claimed
that the MENL was an EAF+, adding the esoteric Polish Congress of the New Right
(KNP), it is in fact an EAF-, losing the PVV – which allegedly does not want to
take European funds – and, for now, the VB. In other words, as it stands, the MENL
is a coalition of just three parties: FN, FPÖ, and LN.

So why did the FN take this step back? The
official reason, by Aymeric Chauprade, leader of the FN faction,
the fifth-largest in the EP, was not very insightful: “We no longer want to be part of the
European Alliance for Freedom because we want to launch a new structure.” Most likely is that the FN wanted a
Euro-party that was founded, and hence fully controlled, by the FN. The party
has long been at the center of pan-European party initiatives, which were always
dominated by former FN leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The EAF was founded without
FN-involvement, however. It was the brainchild of Godfrey Bloom, a far right UKIP
member and former MEP, who collected individual members rather than parties –
including Franz Obermayr (FPÖ), Kent Ekeroth (SD), and Shanon Ellul-Bonici, a
former EP candidate for the Maltese Labour Party. The FN joined only later,
after Marine Le Pen had taken over from her father, and left his more extreme,
and marginal, Alliance of European National Movements (EANM).

A second reason is undoubtedly the loser
stigma that has become associated with the EAF. To some extent the EAF is the
only high-profile failure in the still short but highly successful PN leadership
of Marine Le Pen. Following the popular business strategy of rebranding after
embarrassment (Goodbye Blackwater, Hello Academi!), the new MENL is a fresh
start that is not tainted by failure. It is also to shield Marine Le Pen from
another failure. While she became the face and unofficial leader of the EAF
after joining, the MENL is going to be the project of her foreign policy
advisor Chauprade – a novice to the EP and to the FN.

So what can we expect from the new MENL?
Given that the requirements for European parties, which function only outside
of the EP, are less demanding than for political groups, which exist only within
the European Parliament, there is little doubt that MENL, and an associated
think tank, will be officially recognized by the EU next year. They will then take
the place (and money!) of the EAF and the European Foundation for Freedom
(EFF), its ‘think tank’. While the MENL will have a clearer and more integrated
structure than the EAF, which had a confusing mix of individual and party
members, it will also have the support of fewer parties.

With regard to its main ambition,
forming an official EP group, the MENL is as far away as the EAF. While the PVV
and VB continue to be interested in forming a political group, the MENL is
still two members short – a political group requires 25 MEPs from at least 7
member states. The only other uncommitted far right MEPs are considered too
extreme for the FN or its allies – i.e. representing the extreme right German
National Democratic Party (NPD), Greek Golden Dawn (XA), Movement for a Better
Hungary (Jobbik), and KNP. In the short-run the hope is to pick up some
right-wing dissident MEPs, possibly from Bulgaria Without Censorship (BBT), Polish
Law and Justice (PiS) or UKIP. But this is under the debatable assumption that
Chauprade can keep the other parties on board.

Chauprade is Marine Le Pen’s golden boy, part of her
strategy of ‘de-demonization’. He is a political scientist whose opportunistic
views on ‘geopolitics’ have found support within the French political
mainstream. Chauprade has taught at a variety of different institutions,
including the dubious Institute of Democracy and Collaboration, a pro-Russian
think tank, the surprising Royal
College of Higher Military Education of the Kingdom of Morocco, and the highly respectable
French Joint Defense College and University of Neuchatel in Switzerland. While his influence in the French
political mainstream has decreased since coming out as an FN cadre, Chauprade
is much less isolated than most other far right cadres.

However, Chauprade is also probably the
most outspoken far right supporter of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin.
While many far right parties have recently warmed up to Putin, particularly as a consequence of the conflict
in Ukraine, Chauprade’s support of Putin’s Russia is not simply an anti-EU
strategy – as it is, most notably, for people like Farage and Wilders. Rather, as
he proclaimed in a speech to the Russian parliament last year, he sees
Russia as “the hope of the world
against new totalitarianism.”

In essence, Chauprade follows the
position of the nouvelle droite, the
French ‘new right’ around Alain De Benoist and Guillaume Faye, who even during
the Cold War saw the United States as a bigger threat to Europe (and ‘civilization’)
than the Soviet Union. In fact, Chauprade seems to consider the United States, and Israel, as bigger threats than global Islam! This
is all blasphemy to people like Wilders, and leading members of the VB, who are
staunchly pro-Israel and pro-US.

In short, the MENL is off to a fairly
poor start and seems destined to end the same as its many pan-European far
right predecessors. In almost all ways it is the same old, same old. There is
only one major difference: when the MENL will implode, a Le Pen will not be the
main reason for its failure.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
If you have any queries about republishing please contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.

Recent comments

openDemocracy is an independent, non-profit global media outlet, covering world affairs, ideas and culture, which seeks to challenge power and encourage democratic debate across the world. We publish high-quality investigative reporting and analysis; we train and mentor journalists and wider civil society; we publish in Russian, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese and English.